Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing,
there is a field. I'll meet you there.
When the soul lies down in that grass,
the world is too full to talk about.
Ideas, language, even the phrase each other
doesn't make any sense.--Rumi

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I found it!

Okay, I found my voice. It was hidden in the darnedest of places. It was squelched way down into my belly. It was cowering down there, afraid to come out. I'm not sure what spooked it into hiding. In fact I didn't know it was gone until I showed up to write again. And then it was MIA for days.

When I finally found it, I had to sit with my voice for a long while in the darkness before it would come out and show its face, so, that we could talk and all. I tried to coax it out, but to no avail. When I'd almost given up hope, it finally began to creep out into light, its body low to the ground, vigilant, like a scaredy-cat, as if it believed that if only it appeared smaller, it wouldn't become an obvious target. But at the sound of some violent stomping and the shaking of a disembodied finger pointing in the air, my voice shrank back into hiding again, and I along with it. Some scary shit. Together we listened to the booming echos of an archaic phrase, grave and serious.

Much is given, much is required! Much is given, much is required! Much is given, much is required!

My voice became as small as it possibly could and covered its head with its hands to block out the chanting.

Hey-Zeus, not this again. I thought.

And together my voice and I began to whisper about what this was all about; this rogue weed of conditioning that had been fed and watered in our childhood, and allowed to grow to monstrous proportions.

So, we had nothing else to do but call bullshit on it.

Much is given, much is required. Bullshit.

Much is given, and given freely, because you, dear one, are loved beyond measure.That's more like it.

The only return is the joy you will feel in extending this same freely given love to others.

And we laughed when we remembered that there could be no dysfunctional God that would give and require payback. That this was a very human attribute projected onto God. And if God were to be indeed this dysfunctional, we felt pretty ready to be eternally damned, because we recognized that carrying a thought pattern like this one, in this life, was to already be damned.

In other words, even if I am given beautiful moments of clarity, the present of the present moment, love beyond measure, nothing more is required of me than to be open to receive it. There is no need for me to show you how enlightened I am because of these moments. There is no need for me to show you how I can write about them and synthesize my experience. In fact I can spend the rest of my days writing in clichés, if I want. It all becomes one anyway. This is the nature of form. It gets tired.

So, yes, there is no reason to separate myself as somehow different from anybody else. Because that would be denying the very nature of this existence, which is to give you the illusion that you are doing awesome, really getting it, and then to pull the rug out from under you. And the higher you climb, the harder you fall.

But here within lies the beauty. The harder you fall, the more confused, hurt, disillusioned, or angry you become, the more you crack your heart and head open. You are no longer afraid because you see these patterns inherent to form, and instead of resisting them, you learn to flow with them. You surrender.

So, together my voice and I walked out into the light of day. Because we remembered that we were done pretending long ago. We recognized the pain of separation that comes from squelching our self deep down in hiding, in fear of what others might think if we were to admit that life is hard. We agreed that we hope to say and write a lot of very stupid things in this life, to make a lot of mistakes, and even to appear hypocritical at times.

And we know that we will be the first to laugh at our self, and the first to tell the disembodied finger to lighten up. Maybe we'll even look for the disembodied armpit, and give it a tickle. Who knows?

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